AND, neither a reunion, nor juxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering,
the tracing of a broken line steadily setting off in adjacency, a kind
of active and creative flight line? AND… AND…AND…
- Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues

The interactive installations of Jean Dubois question the connections of inter-subjectivity. His approach convokes this particularity of the interactive portrait of catching the multiple dimensions of an intimate relationship. His appliances propound most certainly programmed encounters, but privileging the numerous actions and reactions of the spectator all the same. Whishing to discuss his proceeding and to exchange the various questions risen, we have undertaken the present E-mail-correspondence.

Marie-Josée Jean: The interactive installations you achieved seem to use the picture as an interface to establish a relationship from oneself to the other. Unlike the photographic, video-, or cinematic picture apprehends by sight, the interactive picture is perceived by the fingers’ tips as the touch allows to reveal its content and to animate the intern movements. The picture we touch and animate metaphorically reproduces the idea of a live relationship. Which is, by much, more eloquent in the interactive portrait that seizes and gives back fragments of behaviours adapted to the relation towards the other. On that behalf I wondered if we could not think that interactivity modifies the status of the picture by detaching it from the idea of the representation of the absent to approach it to the one of a presence to the other. And I’m even tented to add, of a presence in the world in so far as the interactive image, after the fashion of varied contemporary proceedings where interaction predominates, seems to manifest an intense need of sociability by patronizing encounters.

Jean Dubois: The theme of the encounter embraces quite well the notion of interactivity in a cultural frame where communication technologies explode. This is by much more obvious in a technological context that seems to promise us always greater opportunities of socialization. Actually I don’t know if this situation is appeasing or feeding our need to start relationships, but I think that it’s cross-questioning it. The interfaces of communication serve as much as short-cuts, and as filters in the interpersonal relations, which makes them an immense laboratory where experiments are varying from the worst to the best. The contact, made easier by technologic mediation, does in no way guarantee neither the quality nor the profundity of a relationship. This aspect does not at all exclude the necessity of having skill as is required in any immediate encounter. That’s what I partly wanted to show in my installations by implicating the spectator against his will in an ambiguous relation with a fellow. In the beginning the surprise of the interaction amuses, to leave way, the unaccustomed effect being used up, to a feeling of discomfort, seeing oneself gradually playing a part that could be disturbing, if it weren’t a simulated encounter. The experience leaves a sour-sweet taste referring to our own comportment. In this sense, my approach of the interactive picture is suggesting a relationship, not only from oneself towards the other, but above all from the other to oneself. There’d be a kind of boomerang-effect, who’d catch up with us on its turning, suggesting the picture of others to drew implicitly ours in proportion as the interactive exchange is established.

MJJ: The others’ picture makes us realize that our individuality is elaborated on the thread of the encounters, signifying that, on the other side, there is always the presence of another whom you necessarily tally with. What’s disconcerting in your apparatuses, is to seize how much authoritative our attitude towards that other one, whose displacements you dictate with the tips of your fingers, can be. This reminds me a commentary by Jean Cocteau, who said: “Tact in audacity, is to know how far you can go too far.” He seems to suggest that any relationship requires everyone to find the adequate distance allowing us to aim at the other by activating our abilities (often instinctive) in matters of relations. Now it seems to me that in the experience of interactive pictures, we’d be subdued to a relation of proximity with the character whose virtuality allows us certain liberties we’d never dare to commit in a true human relationship. We could also wonder if inter-subjectivity in its virtual form does not have a tendency of uninhibiting the individual taking away his part of responsibilities. What about the behaviour of the spectators who have experienced the interactive portraits you achieved?

JD: Strangely enough, while they are interacting with the portraits, I present to them, the spectators often take notice of the other people present around the apparatus. They are conscious about their behaviour towards the character being observed by thirds. For some of them this creates a kind of pressure, hardening their spontaneity. They are very sensitive and attentive towards the fact that the subject of the work is “the subject at work” and that what is to be seen, is somewhat due to their unveiling through their choices and reactions. Some spectators have been confiding to me, that they had avoided experimenting in public on my works and had preferred coming back later when they’d be on their own.

I consider this being symptomatic for the utilization of new technologies in interpersonal relations. The recent accession of the different network-communication-services (E-mail, discussion-groups, web-chats) points out a particular type of public space, where the social connections, amplified by the instant globalisation of exchanges, are often leaked out by anonymity. The widely spread use of pseudonyms and avatars shows us somehow that the electronic promiscuity on the web by compensation needs a certain kind of identity-protection. In several cases it is considered as being an occasion to openly convey with anyone, without really having to expose oneself personally. Then I wonder if this kind of technologic mediation would not correspond to the current discomfort in the system of interpersonal relations. One can suspect that, behind the infatuation with this type of interpersonal mediation, exists, up to a certain point, a desire longing to enter relationships with others avoiding, thanks to the informatics technologies, the current social inhibitions. I think the portraits I created somehow participate in showing this dynamic process. The spectators can have access to a relation of proximity or intimacy with the characters, however without engaging in mutually delivering something by themselves. Yet this is becoming totally different when other spectators are immediately at their sides. In these circumstances, they are part of the performance as well as object of regard. The machine does not protect them from this kind of presence. They are confronted to a hand-to-hand relation without any technologic mask.

MJJ: Actually at stake in the strategies of interaction and conviviality of your artistic work, is the attitude the spectator adopts towards this other one who observes him. It’s by this scenography of the spectator in interaction with the other spectators that the power of sociability of the work seems to spread. So the apparatus questions the process through which we visualize and construct such a relation.

The acceptance of an artwork seldom happens in a state of solitude; we constantly interact with the present persons: each one observes the other’s reaction and exchanges about the shared experience. There are not always exclusive relations between the work and the spectator, because there necessarily is the intervention of multiple individualities that interfere in the process of the reception, the forming of an opinion… This doubtlessly explains the importance, in your apparatus, of the question about inter-subjectivity. So the accent is put on the individualities thwarted by the reactions of the other present being.
This common need of exchanging and interacting – incarnated here in the aesthetic experience but presenting itself in each ones everyday life – certainly is not new, as the individuals always have mutually established relations of communication at all ages. Doubtlessly the difference consists in the social value that is nowadays granted to it. Lacking of grand ideologies, communication is playing a part as social binder in the contemporary world. So the question that may be asked is to know if that relational dimension would not be symptomatic of a new subjectivity based on the need of being linked.

JD: It’s undeniable that communication is playing an important part in our system of values. However I don’t think it’s because we lost our belief in the grand ideologies. The valorisation of communication reveals itself also as a great ideology. It is even dominating in our society. If one imagines the power and the thrust one grants to mass media and new informatics technologies, one can hardly not see there an ideological power. When we are emphasized with new-media telematics permitting us free exchanges and real interpersonal contacts, we’ll have to beware of not only the real power of these technologies, but also of the given idea that there could exist whatever a form of communication, allowing an ultimate relational emancipation, communication is a moving field, difficult to outline, never to be bound, whatever the scale or the kind of means that might be used. The fact of „communicating“, does not settle everything, even at a face-to-face encounter, meeting or an artistic performance in situ. The direct contact with an artist in the flesh is not less artificial. It can be realised without necessarily guaranteeing more intimacy or authenticity. However, mainly during the sixties, with the first relational tries of the Living Theatre and the happenings of Alan Kaprow, one seems to believe on the occasion, that this is possible in an immediate artistic consummation of the work of art and the sociology of aesthetic contemplation. I think it’s a godly wish, issued from the liturgy of communication as well. The art, even if inviting the spectator to participate or implicating a relational aesthetic, still establishes an asymmetric relation in which the artist plays a privileged if not central part. So the subject of the inter-subjective relation in my artistic works does not at all offer a solution, but rather proposes a hard problematic dealing with the difficulties of communicating with or without technologic apparatuses. As a matter of fact, it‘s about returning the question, with a hint of irony, to the immediate universe of the spectator, by inviting him to question the matter of the responsibility his part as interlocutor implies.

Jean Dubois
is a multidisciplinary artist, who first worked in the field of installations and urban intervention before giving himself at the school of visual and mediatic arts of the university of Quebec at Montreal. Since june 2001, together with Lynn Hughes, he’s leading the group of research and creation Interstices, consecrated to the realisation of mediatic installations (www.interstices.ca). His artistic work particularly explores the poetic potential of the interactive picture and puts on an approach dealing with alterity and inter-subjectivity. He mainly uses tactile screens as corporal interface so as to put into contact the spectator with fictive personalities, by proposing intimate encounters with others body and memory. The situations this way suggested establish as well a dynamic of seduction, as of disappointment.

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